Books May Not Change Our Suffering, Books

As Readers, We Have Gone From Learning A Precious Craft Whose Secret Was Held By A Jealous Few, To Taking For Granted A Skin That Has Become Subordinate To Principles Of Mindless Financial Profit Or Mechanical Efficiency, A Skill For Which Governments Care Almost Nothing.

Not Until I Came To Canada Did I Realize That Snow Was A Four-letter Word.

To Say That An Author Is A Reader Or A Reader An Author, To See A Book As A Human Being Or A Human Being A Book, To Describe The World As Text Or A Text As The World, Are Ways Of Naming The Readers Craft.

The American Psychologist Julian Jaynes, In A Controversial Study On The Origin Of Consciousness, Argued That The Bicameral Mind - In Which One Of The Hemispheres Becomes Specialized In Silent Reading - Is A Late Development In Humankind's Evolution, And That The Process By Which This Function Develops Is Still Changing.

We Are Losing Our Common Vocabulary, Built Over Thousands Of Years To Help And Delight And Instruct Us, For The Sake Of What We Take To Be The New Technology's Virtues.